Chrome + SpecForce Bundle

Spacetime Studios' latest and greatest mobile/browser MMO Arcane Legends is now live on Android devices and the Google Chrome Web Store, giving fantasy fighters everywhere a chance to take on the forces of evil with their best pals by their side. Anyone keen on a Kotaku-exclusive in-game weapon?

Spacetime Studios applies lessons learned over the past few years of creating pocket-sized MMOs for mobile and web browsers to create its most impressive game yet. Arcane Legends sees players and their pets teaming up to take on all sorts of fantasy nasties, gathering powerful equipment, fighting PVP battles and learning a little something about friendship along the way.

Players can choose between the beefy Warrior, nimble Rogue or oddly blue and squiggly Sorcerer. Kotaku readers can make that Sorcerer decidedly less squiggly with the Celestial Staff, an exclusive frost weapon just for you folks. Seriously, share this with anyone else and we'll find you.

Here's the code: kotaku111312

And here's how you use it:

New Players:
1. Start the app and play through the beginning of the game.

2. Be sure that you are on the correct class of character that matches the Promo Code item.

3. Once you enter Windmoore town, tap on the icon of your character in the upper left

4. In the menu that appears, tap on the button to Quit to Menu in the lower left.

5. Tap the STS Nexus button on the top menu bar

6. Tap the Enter Promo Code button in the lower right of the Offers tab

7. Enter the Promo Code

8. A message will appear stating that the item has been granted to your character

Current Players:
1. Start the app and log in.

2. At character select, make sure you are seeing the character you want the Promo Code item to go to (Axes or big swords for Warriors, daggers or dual blades for Rogues, staves or wands for the Sorcerer.)

3. Tap the STS Nexus button on the top menu bar

4. Tap the Enter Promo Code button in the lower right of the Offers tab

5. Enter the Promo Code

6. A message will appear stating that the item has been granted to your character

Hey, look! There's this new thing on Google Chrome where you can build stuff with LEGO. It's part of a new partnership, and it's super cool. But don't judge by my horrendous creation that you see above.

You can build stuff right on the map of Australia or New Zealand in rotatable 3D, and share your (hopefully less ugly) houses and buildings and whatever else you come up with.

Coming from the daughter of two architects, I really should have done better. But in my excited haste to show you all Google's new partnership with LEGO Australia, my rushed house came out kind of crappy. It definitely won't pass inspection. Maybe I should consider turning it into a haunted house instead.

That commercial recently won Bronze Lion Award in the Direct Lions category of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. That festival is in the same city that holds the famous Cannes Film Festival. So this is like the Cannes Film Festival of commercials!

There's a prequel to the latest Battlestar Galactica series on the way, dealing with the adventures of a certain Bill Adama during the first Cylon War.

Here's the series' first trailer, which it appears somebody snuck out of last weekend's Wondercon. It looks exciting, and surprisingly expensive. Then again, it's a trailer. It's supposed to look good. Whether the actual show (filmed almost entirely on green screen) can live up to this is anyone's guess!

The series is called Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome. It began filming last year, and while it was at one point mooted as a candidate for being an online-only affair, this looks too awesome to not get the big (well, bigger-than-a-monitor) screen treatment.

Missed this somehow when it came it appeared a couple of days ago, but it’s worth a look for anyone using Chrome as their browser: Carbon Games have release AirMech for free, here. It’s sort of RTS/tower defence/shoot ‘em up with a transforming robot, and it can even be played co-operatively or competitively with others. It’s fast paced and looks lovely with its retro pixel art. Pretty impressive for a browser game, I would say.

The Stranger's Dream add-on hits on 12/14 for $1 and, as the title suggests, expands the backstory of the mysterious narrator. It also opens up two new modes. The customizable Score Attack lets you mix and match from the unlocked Spirits and Idols modifiers to rack up as many points as you can while the cakewalk No Sweat provides minimal challenge for those who just want to experience the story. This DLC will be available for Bastion for Chrome, too, in the next few weeks. The XBLA version will cost $1 and the Steam version comes as a free title update. More details can be found at Supergiant's website.

OK, Google’s Chrome browser just officially became scary/magnificent. It’s been able to run a few games – like Plants vs Zombies – in a browser window for a while now, but the excellent Bastion has just been added, marking a serious step up in what’s technologically possible. The game starts playing in less than a minute of clicking the button to add it, it looks just like the standard version as far as I can tell, runs smoothly and scales to your screen/window size. Oh, and you can play a free demo then pay to unlock the full thing right away if you like. (more…)

First, Supergiant Games' acclaimed action RPG came out for the Xbox 360 as one of the games in Microsoft's annual Summer of Arcade promotion. Then, shortly after that, the narrator-centric release landed on Steam, which let PC owners tour the game's shattered world of Caelondia. Now the hit indie's been made to play in Google's very own browser software— at full resolution and everything—where even more people can experience one of 2011''s best games.

Hopefully, that gamepad support will find its way into this web version before too long. I gave the free trial of browser Bastion a spin on my iMac this morning and it looked as beautiful as it did on the Xbox 360. There's a significant chunk of initial load time as the game boots up but it ran smoothly for the 10 minutes or so I fiddled around with it. The game saves your progress to the cloud, which makes me think you can stop and start on different machines. However, you'll need a Google account log-in to do this. If you're curious, definitely try it out. Bastion's live on the Chrome web store now and, after the free trial, the full game's available for purchase at $14.99.

Cell phone owners from all walks of life have flocked to popular, affordable mobile game Angry Birds for its bite-sized entertainment, quirky humor and cheerful art style. Physicists, however, are taking to the game for an entirely different sort of reason.

"We're using physics to explore this completely new video game world. We get to ask questions just like scientists ask when they're trying to figure out the atmospheric composition of a planet, or the motion of a new never before seen asteroid," said John Burk, a physics teacher at Westminster Schools in Atlanta, Georgia. "What are the laws of physics in the Angry Birds world? My students get a chance to be scientists, and be among the first to find the answer to this question. "

Burk is among a growing group of physics teachers and students exploring the game as a way to reduce the study of nature and how the universe behaves to something not only a bit more accessible, but fun.

Allain made a name for himself analyzing and writing about the physics found in a myriad of different forms of pop culture, from lucky basketball shots to science fiction stories.

"I like to write about things I enjoy," Allain said. "I started playing Angry Birds and discovered it is surprisingly fun, so I thought I would analyze it. It's a fun game. It's a simple game and it lends itself to being analyzed."

"That's the magic of physics: Everything we are interested in we can explore more and find out how complicated it is."

One of the reasons Angry Birds made the jump from the cell phone to the classroom was because it became available on Google's Chrome web browser, making it easier for folks to capture video of the their own attempts at launching birds across the screen and into buildings. This was vital because it also allowed fans of physics to analyze the results with a special computer program.

Frank Noschese, a physics teacher at John Jay High School in Cross River, New York, used the program to create several videos he posted on his website. A month later physics teacher Michael Magnuson created five physics exam questions and sent them around on an email list dedicated to Western New York physics teachers. The idea was to get students to figure out the answers using Angry Birds and video analysis software.

The questions asked if a blue angry bird conserves energy when it splits in three, or a white bird conserves momentum when it drops its bomb. One question had students ricochet an angry bird off of a block in the world and then determine the coefficient of restitution and the mass of the angry bird.
"One of the things about video games is that it's kind of like starting over," Allain said. "Like starting over with real physics in a new world.Angry Birds doesn't obey all of the laws of physics. Blue birds, if you tap it in flight make three birds. But that doesn't obey the rules about conservation of mass

While the game breaks the real rules of physics, that doesn't mean it isn't without its own rules.

"There are rules,' Allain said. "There is a truth."

I suggested he just ask the developers what that rule is, but Allain said that would be like skipping to the end of a good book or movie.

"I don't want them to spoil my fun," he said. "I don't want them to tell me what happens in the movie Thor either."

Nochese says he plans to start using Angry Birds in his regular curriculum starting next year, introducing each problem at the appropriate time to teach about things like the conservation of momentum and projectile motion.

"Video games are a nice addition to a physics teacher's bag of tricks," he said. "But I don't see video games replacing sports, cards, or anything else relevant to our students. In fact, for my students' final physics projects, there were groups that investigated baseball, wiffleball, golf, longboarding, and lacrosse. When we did projectile motion, I introduced the unit with the YouTube video of Kobe Bryant jumping over a swimming pool of snakes. They wanted to know if the video was real or fake."

Rhett, who typically teaches upper level physics students and those with very specific focuses, has never brought Angry Birds into the classroom.

Burk, though, started using the game in his classroom straight away.

"They loved it," he said. "I think students thought that it was a really interesting problem to think about why the gravitational field in the Angry Birds world (if we assume that the birds are normal size) would be less than than in the real world. If Rovio had chosen a realistic value for the gravitational field the motion would have happened much more quickly, and the game would likely not be as fun."

The students have become so enthralled with their examination of the physics of Angry Birds' fictional world that some have suggested moving on to another cell phone game: Tiny Wings.

The fact that video games like Angry Birds don't always use the rules of real world physics just makes things more interesting and challenging for students, Burk said. That's because instead of relying on the rules they already know to figure things out, students are asked to figure out who those new laws are and then to think about why a game designer decided to break the real rules of physics.

Next year Burk plans to take things further, having students pursue projects of their choosing to investigate the physics of a video game.

"With each game that gets released," he said, "we get a whole new world to explore."

Well Played is an internationally syndicated weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

Harmless distractions like Angry Birds are perfectly acceptable browser game fodder, should you have nothing better to play, but a newly released port of emulator DOSbox for Google's Chrome browser is the superior option—especially if you love LucasArts adventure games.

NaClBox makes that possible. It's a newly released port of DOSbox—the free emulator used by the likes of id Software and LucasArts use for their classic MS-DOS re-releases (Wolfenstein 3D, Star Wars: Dark Forces) for modern day PCs. GOG.com uses DOSbox for its retro releases. Bethesda and 3D Realms recommend it too.

And NaClBox works just fine, based on my experience playing games like The Secret of Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Sim City 2000 in Chrome. The emulator port's creators have demos of a handful of classic DOS titles available for testing at the official NaClBox site.

Ultimately, what NaClBox could mean for old school gaming enthusiasts is one more way—one easier way—to play proto-PC games from their browser or Chrome OS—which, by the way, is coming to Samsung hardware this summer.

Head over to the official NaClBox site to learn more, then give the emulator a whirl if you're interested. Just go easy on the guys' bandwidth, OK?